RedditorDankestKush420wanted to hear from the people who have survived the darkness of the sea.
They asked:
"Deep sea divers, what are your horror stories?"
I almost drowned from a small but wave on the Florida coast. So a deep dive is a lifelong HELL NO for me. But go ahead... tell us some stories.
Poof. Gone.
GIF by VPROGiphy"I was watching a documentary about saturation divers the other day. Absolutely scary stuff. They live in a dome under the sea for several days/weeks so they don't have to decompress every day."
"There was this interview where one diver told a story about a colleague just vanishing. He was right behind him at one moment and then was gone in the next. No signs of an accident on the safety line, no sounds, no light signals, he was just gone."
PenguinSwordfighter
Implosions
"I used to work at a dive shop, a regular customer of mine told me on one of his deep cave dives at around 300 feet his main light imploded, and both of his backup flashlights failed. While this happened he also lost his guide line (read: life line back to the surface)."
"He was in a large room, so he dropped a reel with line on it and swam back and forth basically fishing for the guide line. He eventually hooked it and located it, but then had to make a decision which way to follow the line. The correct choice would lead him to safety, while the wrong choice would lead him deeper into the cave system. He made his choice and slowly followed the line out."
"He reached his first spare air tank that he staged and knew he chose the right direction. He had a long wait at each of his staged decompression tanks. It took him, from what I recall, around 7 hours to properly decompress and make it back out of the cave, all while not being able to see a damn thing."
pwnstar
side-by-side...
"I went on a group dive trip with someone who was pretty experienced, and he was telling us a bunch of stories about his wreck dive down to an old WWII-era Japanese warship sunken in the Pacific. One somewhat morbid but funny story was when his group went into the ship and saw several pairs of shoes strewn about, lying perfectly side-by-side."
"After they all surfaced later, one girl in the group was like, 'Why did they leave their shoes behind like that?' and everyone else just looked at each other like, 'Oh man... who's gonna tell her?' Anyway, the real horror story is about a father and son duo who had decided to go on this trip as a bonding experience. So the thing to note about WWII shipwrecks is that after over half a century, they're pretty much rusted to oblivion."
"One bad kick will effectively disintegrate a perfectly-preserved captain's log, just from the motion of the water. Well, the duo was exploring the inside of the ship, and suddenly someone hears a loud CLANG! The father and son had wandered into an enclosed room, and the door had slammed shut with both of them inside."
"At that point, the guy telling the story paused, and someone else in the group was like, 'Wait, so what happened to them?' And the guy was like, 'What the hell do you mean, man? They got trapped and f**king died!' And in that moment, I decided f**k that s**t - I am never, ever diving down to go check out the inside an old WWII warship lmao."
yungbabo
Unreal
"For as long as I been around the internet 1 diver story stuck with me. Not because of paranormal or unexplainable events. This person's story said they were deep diving with their father and literally saw a Lovecraftian size creature envelope his father ahead. After all was said and done at the surface he come to find out later his schizophrenia had come to while he was deep sea diving. I couldn't imagine seeing something your brain was telling you was real. Especially in that setting."
SunnyvaleRicky
Vortex
Joe Biden Reaction GIF by GIPHY NewsGiphy"One time when I was on a diving boat with some friends, one of the guys on there told about a story about how he used to be an underwater welder, and one time he and some other guys witnessed someone getting sucked through a hole the size of a tic tac."
Dragon_King3199
Why do people even go that far down?
Everywhere
marine life wildlife GIF by KQEDScienceGiphy"I’m by no means a deep sea diver, but I am a licensed diver, sea urchins are massive and everywhere, like you really don’t expect their size and how common they are."
drewdreds
Wrecked
"Did a 60M/200ft dive on a wreck in a shipping channel. The dive boat skipper should call up the harbour master and check if there are any ships scheduled, and if there are not good to dive. Anyway did the dive. 25 mins bottom time so a fair amount of deco."
"During the 12M deco stop we could hear the rumble of a very very very large engine. Hmmm. Kept getting louder. And louder. And louder. During the 9M stop it got REALLY loud we looked at each other, gave two thumbs down and bolted back down to 18M and just hung there figuratively shi**ing our drysuits until it got quieter after a few minutes."
"We then resumed our deco. A small pod of dolphins came in to have a gander at us which was cool. A big f**k off panamax sort-a-size ship had come within 100M of our deco buoy. Never dived off that boat again."
thedugong
Gruesome
Not sure if anyone has mentioned it, but the [Byford Dolphin Diving Bell Accident] (https://www.reddit.com/r/CatastrophicFailure/comments/4x1a2c/comment/d6blno6/) is pretty gruesome and scary. Basically, when deep see divers were returning to the surface, they were in a decompression chamber at a very high pressure."
"And there was a catastrophic failure of the decompression room that meant the air depressurized several atmospheres almost instantaneously and killed a couple divers by literally exploding them from the pressure release. Not sure what could be more of a gruesome tale than that."
anon_e_mous9669
The Worst
"Not my story but still wanted to share: it's the story of a diver who was hired to remove and bring back bodies from a bridge that collapsed into semi deep water with numerous cars on it. Some people made it out of their cars and some didn't. But the worst thing that he saw was the bodies of children still stuck in the cars while the parents saved their own lives. The thought of going into murky water to essentially fish up corpses that are like a day old chills me every time I think about it."
sarper97
Nope!
Not Gonna Happen No Way GIF by FaZe ClanGiphy"I went diving to a wreck around 200ft down, and I heard this terrifying roar and saw some creature almost twice the size of a blue whale. Noped right outta there as soon as I saw that, I'm not going there again, I'll stay in my lifepod."
Overgrown_fetus1305
Roar
"I saw a lion fish at 27 feet in Cozumel a couple weeks ago. I made it out okay though."
Fieos
"Lion fish generally aren’t very dangerous. Yes, they have toxic spines but it’s not exactly easy to end up with their spines in you. You’d have to be pretty damn careless to do it. I’d honestly say there’s a lot of common eels that are substantially more likely to hurt you. I’ve got a pair of fins with some large chomp marks from a mean ass wolf eel."
Tlentic
LA Craziness
"Totally late, but this is an amazing account of a police diver that had to dive in the La Brea tar pits in L.A. iI’s intense. La Brea tar pits dive"
vroomvroom450
The body
"Mr. Ballen on YouTube has some really nice videos on cave divers and horror stories, you should check him out."
Pelios
"I watched one of them today 😠the one where the guy goes back to retrieve a diver that died who was never found and during the rescue, he disappeared too and drowned."
"The other divers there launched another rescue group and he was found holding the guy he was retrieving and both of their bodies were brought to the surface and were laid to rest. the parents of the young original diver felt guilty about the one who died getting their son’s body. Such a sad story."
lunababygirl09
On Holiday
"So I was at this diving resort where there was one instructor/guide who spoke my language. He told me about how 10 years ago he and his friends had been diving in open sea, it was supposed to be a 30m dive but there was a heavy downdraft and they all got sucked down, he's guessing 70m."
"With a lot of effort most managed to get out of that current and into another one which luckily brought them back up. One of them didn't. He saw his friend drown. He told me this when I asked about safety at the resort and he didn't bring it as a cautionary tale. I've spend the rest of my holiday with another guide who spoke broken English."
Aggressive_Tear_769
Intense
Horror Reaction GIF by SpongeBob SquarePantsGiphy"Nothing to add myself but this is my favorite compilation of diver horror stories. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CdIni-VEHJ4 Warning some of them are pretty intense and involve witnessing murders."
Kryptosis
Thanks Dad
"Not my story but my dad's, he said they've been diving around 40m down in some ocean/sea I don't really remember, in the middle of the descent he noticed his bubbles didn't go up, they went down to the abyss, he looked at his wrist depth meter and he saw he started to descent way faster then he was supposed to, he got caught by an underwater current."
"He said that inflating his jacket didn't really work nor did releasing the led weights from his pockets. thanks to his massive freaking testicles he found a way out of it. I sometimes scuba dive with him, in shallow waters, but the idea if this happening f**king terrifies me."
Mhaul
No Air
"Not me but I read a post from someone who went diving a lot a while ago. She said there's something that happens to the brain if you go too far down too quickly or something? Or maybe it just happens randomly. But you can start hallucinating. She said that at some point she was swimming down and all of a sudden started hearing children crying and calling for her to swim more downward toward them. Then her oxygen was going to run out and she would have definitely drowned if her diving partner hadn't grabbed her and forced her to the surface."
ToastedMaple
Don't Watch
Breathe Chris Hemsworth GIF by NETFLIXGiphy"Always hated the idea of deep sea diving. Saw 'Last Breath' a couple weeks ago and even though I knew what the outcome was I was still so nervous and scared watching it."
Shovel1708
Well that is all I need to hear. I'll stay on dry land, thank you.
Headbutted....
fall slap GIFGiphyI wear contacts so getting water in my mask is extra bad as I cant open my eyes under water. Shortly after being told about a shark colliding with my friend from behind and removing his mask I am pretty scared about this (not sharks in general.) And I see a shark heading for me.
They are curious, they often shoulder bump you as they turn at the last second. But she wasn't changing course. I stayed calm and still as long as I could and at the last second before she hit my mask I ducked. Except instead of ducking under I just headbutted her right in the nose. Everyone saw and thinks it was the funniest thing ever. I may be the only person alive who headbutted an 11foot shark in the nose but it was because I was scared she would take my goggles off.
The Freedive....
Free dove to about 160 ft in Deans Blue hole in the Bahamas. It's where a lot of the free diving world records are set - super neat place, google a picture.
Anyway I'd never really been past 100ft freediving, but this was the perfect place to do it. No current, there's ropes to keep you straight and allow a slight pull back up.
Scary part is that you become pretty strongly negatively buoyant after like 60ft, so you're basically hauling butt down while doing nothing and using very little air. So I'm dazed out a bit feeling good and counting the lines that mark depth and all of a sudden feel pressure like my trachea is going to collapse and wake up and realize I've counted to the line that's around 160 ft or so.
Very scary moment because I wasn't sure if my body could take the depth or if I had gone too far and wouldn't have enough air to get back up, which is a much slower and more air intensive process.
To the Depth....
I got the bends once. I was careful. Followed my charts and my computer. Had appropriate depths and surface time. But I didn't drink enough water so I was all out of whack.
Felt fine until I got home, mild headache. Then I woke up and it was just pain in my left arm. Elbows. fingers.
Couldn't even bend them without bad pain. My headache was intense and I was so dizzy. Called my older more experienced dive buddy and I got rushed to the hospital.
Docs got me hooked up and fluids, checked my dive logs while the decompression chamber was set up. And then got me in there with a nurse.
8 hours in a tube about the length of a car but as wide as maybe a double bed? I was on oxygen and hooked up to an IV and it was so loud, with all the air rushing in. As soon as I got to "depth" the pain vanished. It was crazy.
I'm fine now obviously. But I wasn't allowed to dive for a month which sucked but hey. The dives were pretty great.
Pitch Black....
Saved someone from drowning while SCUBA Diving... person had an epileptic seizure at 85 feet of water in a pitch black cavern that I was diving also. I was hovering above just watching the flashlights move about when I noticed one flashlight not moving, I swam down and was met with the other diver with no regulator in their mouth, eyes open and just on their knees. The divers buddy was next to them and in complete shock to what was going on and was not assisting whatsoever. 15 years of diving and instructor training came over me like it was second nature.
I thought her regulator just came out so I popped mine out and offered it to her, that when I noticed she had done mentally checked out. I popped my #2 regulator in my mouth and attempted to put my #1 regulator in her mouth but her teeth were completely clenched... I then press the purged button to get air into her mouth and noticed her cheeks moving so I know air was getting in there. That was good enough for me, I then grabbed her under her arm and get the regulator flowing in her mouth and swan to the opening of the cavern and then up over 60 feet to get her to the surface.
One on the surface did everything I was trained to do, inflate bc, dumped her weights, got her on her back and started towing to land. As I'm towing her in she is regurgitating all the water she swallowed and inhaled, it seemed like gallons of water. Got her to land where other divers assisted me in getting all her gear off. She was breathing fine and alive but in shock for a while and slowly came around like nothing happened.
We were very lucky that we were only 10 minutes into the dive or for sure we would have both been bent and spending time in a hyperbaric chamber. The crazy thing is she didn't tell anyone she had epilepsy and when we later reviewed her consent form she checked off "no" to epilepsy. I put myself at risk shooting up to the surface like that but if I came across that situation again I would not hesitate to save someone's life.
before the storm....
Diving the day before a hurricane on a small south pacific island. Out of nowhere a black and white sea snake (venomous) wrapped itself around my arm.
Apparently this happens from time to time before major storms- they can sense it and look for things that are heading towards the shore so that they don't have to put in so much effort to get out of the sea. As soon as I was in the shallows it uncurled and headed up the beach where it hid under a breadfruit tree.
I thought I was going to get bitten to death by a snake at sea... Turns out I was just a taxi for a very calm but rather rushed reptile.
Humans for the lost...
The only scare I've had is some jackass in a yacht cruising through our dive location at full throttle. You could hear the boat coming for a solid minute or two before it flew over our heads.
Our boat had a dive flag on it and we had a buoy with a dive flag on it. They didn't even slow down.
Barracuda, sharks, rays, manatees, dolphins... All cool. Humans are way scarier.
The Sea Horse....
My biology teacher told us that she once was swimming in the south of the Philippines because she was trying to find an elusive sea horse and she went quite deep at night when they are more active and she got attacked by a shark and her team got out fast, the next day they found a turtle that was bitten in half shell included that was pretty big and its supposedly the last time she went diving in that area.
Water Diapers
I once had diarrhea at 100 feet. That sucked. It was amazing how warm it made me at depth, but was a nightmare to clean up. I vomited at my own stench (or maybe from the flu).
Edit: Thank you for awarding one of the most truly horrible experiences of my life. Some say everything happens for a reason. I now like to think I endured that literal crap-show (this happened in front of maybe 20 people) so that years later I would be able to entertain a few anonymous strangers.
The Final POV
Not my story but my parents. They like to scuba dive when traveling and have gone several times over the years. Once they visited Mexico and went diving there before I was born. I'm not sure where they were exactly, but my mom was slightly lower down than my dad and looking at the ocean floor. He was looking up and around.
My mom had on a gold necklace that was floating in the water around her, it was a sunny day and a fairly shallow dive so it was sparkling.
From my mom's pov, she was going along having a grand ole time looking at the sea critters below, when suddenly my dad grabbed her and started frantically shaking her arm to get her attention. She looked up and a barracuda was directly in front of her, closer than was comfortable and staring intently, scary teeth on full display.
It was focused on the shiny necklace and was just hovering there, transfixed. She slowly moved up her hand to cover the necklace and they slowly and calmly moved away from it and it took off without bothering them anymore, but still pretty unsettling and taught my mom to be a little more aware of her surroundings when diving.
Stay in the Light...
dark GIFGiphyNight diving is incredibly creepy. You don't realize how dark the ocean is until you are in it.
Searching in St. Thomas....
I forgot to take my silver bracelet off. It had a crystal charm on it. This was in St. Thomas I believe. Anyway, I saw a barracuda and was pretty excited... until it zeroed in on my hand and shot towards me. I quickly covered my bracelet with my other hand when it was close.
It kind of watched me for a few minutes but eventually just swam away. I awkwardly swam back to the boat, still covering my bracelet. And that is why I no longer wear jewelry or even have shiny painted nails when I swim in the ocean. I was a little freaked out by mostly I just laughed at my stupidity.
Under the Sea...
The Byford Dolphin diving bell accident
Long story short, some divers came up from an extremely deep dive at an oil drilling rig, and someone messed up the decompression procedure and opened the door while the chamber was still pressurized at depth.
The four divers were instantly killed, and the one nearest the door literally exploded and they found bits of his body all over the oil rig.
So, next time someone tells you that people don't explode in decompression chambers like you see in the movies... tell them they're wrong.
diving fail GIF
He was 18, part of the dive club at his school. They went on a diving trip. The crew that handled the dive counted heads wrong and halfway through the dive the boat went back to shore without them... So there they were 2km from shore with their only option to swim back. There were about 5 of them, 2 girls 3 guys. All of them between 15-18 y/o.
About halfway through one of the girls couldn't swim anymore and started crying, my brother along with another guy swam with her, dragging her along, making sure she didn't drown. Everyone made it out ok.
Worst part, school tried to hide it, and had the audacity to suspend my brother from school for catching him with a beer while on the trip. Needless to say they were in deep shit when it came out. Not sure exactly what happened though.
6-8 feet at a time....
Was doing a boat dive and came up to find 20 foot swells. We just had to chill for a while down under until the boat would calm down and we could actually grab the ladder without getting smashed. I remember seeing the ladder going up and down 6-8 feet at a time. I finally grabbed the rope and climbed up as fast as I could. I hung on to the ladder and the boat crew grabbed my BCD and hauled me out of the water and onto the swim step. Half the divers puked on the way back into port. That was the roughest conditions that I have ever been diving in.
Levels of Scary....
It wasn't exactly a deep dive, but it was one of the most terrifying moments of my life. I was on a beach dive with my parents, having swum from the beach out to a small reef and then descending. It was only a few minutes after getting down to the reef that something started going on with my parents. My mother was agitated and clutching her chest. We surfaced and she started spitting up dark liquid and struggling to breathe.
Fortunately, it was a busy beach and after we inflated an emergency buoy, lifeguards rushed out and carried her back to the shore where an ambulance waited. It turned out she'd had swimmers edema induced by the greater pressure. Things turned out fine, but having a medical emergency underwater in the ocean is a specially level of scary.
In the New Year!
Happy Birthday Reaction GIFGiphyI did a shipwreck night dive on New Year's Eve one year, and it was spooky as hell. 80 ft down, really small plane.
Visibility was obviously not great (I've only done this one night dive), so these slow moving fish would come looming out of the dark.
Scarier to me was getting back on the boat, because it got really stormy. You'd be looking UP at the ladder, and it'd come crashing down right next to you. The waves were crazy. My brother got hit by the ladder, but not too badly, and we all managed to get back ok.
Through the lens....
I wear heavy prescription lenses and can't wear contact lenses. Halfway through a week long live aboard dive trip, someone dropped a tank on my prescription mask and shattered it. I usually had a second set with me, but could not find them and only brought one, because hey, nothing had ever happened before.
I am functionally blind without corrective lenses; I can see colors and that's about it, starting about five inches from my face. I was devastated, but decided to go diving anyway, with my husband as my seeing-eye diver. I could see my gauges, so I felt reasonably safe.
It was among the most amazing three days of diving I've ever had. I saw the colors, shapes, and movement. Without being focused on the details, I actually took many of the best underwater photos I'd ever taken. I wasn't worried about focusing on a particular coral or fish; I was looking at the larger color patterns.
So it didn't turn out to be the disaster I'd thought it was.
Let me Count the Ways....
Honestly the things that really scare me, makes my heart run fast etc are two:
- If my air consumption looks funky suggesting a leak or the current is suddenly fast - basically anything that COULD lead to a life-threatening issue due to running out of air. When you're deep, you can't just fly back up and be fine...
- Hurting reefs. Like honestly if my hand brushes against one (even dead) or gets super close so the dust unsettles because of the current or something I feel so, so, so guilty. Wit-wat-4
Lung Issues....
Only thing that really scares me is lung expansion injuries. So the one time I was freaked out was swimming near a wreck at about 100ft. I lost perspective (and buoyancy control) and suddenly realized I had surfaced about 40ft in 30s or less. Visions of the bends and a popped lung instantly came to mind and dropped a ton of air from my BC to get back to depth in a hurry.
Got a massive squeeze from it in my ears, but it gave me a chance to calm the hell down and get a better sense of where I was and reestablish buoyancy control.
Bottom line - the scariest things that can happen while driving is the thing you can do to yourself.
A Florida Story....
GIF by MashableGiphyI was diving in the early 90's off the coast of Florida. I had been using a spearfish ineffectually for a few minutes when I heard a strange grinding noise to my right. I turned my head to see an enormous set of barracuda jaws grinding just inches from my face. I still recall the fish's eye rotating around to check me out as if considering it should take a bite or not.
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